


accidentally in like

by harpers_mirror (SapphireBryony)



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, F/M, Pure Unadulterated Fluff, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, but in a cute way, everything that can go wrong does, human!Hera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 12:01:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5966698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphireBryony/pseuds/harpers_mirror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Watering some plants and baby-sitting his nephew shouldn't have been quite this complicated, even for Doug Eiffel. And yet, there he was sopping wet on his cute neighbor's kitchen floor, regretting every choice he'd made today.</p><p>Plus jam of unknown origin, hand-holding, and scientifically accurate polka-dot rocket ships.</p>
            </blockquote>





	accidentally in like

“Alright Sammy,” Doug told the squirming toddler. “You’ve gotta promise me that you won’t touch anything, okay?”

Sammy bobbed his head up and down rapidly. 

“Promise?” Doug pressed him. 

“Promise Unca Doug!” 

Doug took in the angelically sincere expression on his nephew’s sticky face and sighed. “Okay then. Away we go. But when we get back, we’ll have to do something about that jam on your face. How is it that kids always manage to be covered in jam even when they haven’t eaten any?” 

“I dunno!” piped up Sammy and Doug laughed. 

“Rhetorical question, munchkin. Alrighty. Remember our promise!” 

With that, he shifted Sammy to one hip and fished the key out of his pocket. Turning it, he opened the door to his neighbor’s apartment. 

Doug had met Hera when she moved in two doors down the hall from him last month, and they’d hit it off. She was a...well, Doug could never remember exactly what it was she did but it was something that sounded terribly smart and complicated. Something with computers, he thought, and rocket science? 

Or maybe she’d said it _wasn’t_ rocket science. That could have been it. 

Either way, Doug knew she was pretty brilliant, and kind of adorably literal in a way that reminded him of if Dr. Brennan from Bones had relatively normal social skills. She was also a level of cute that Doug privately thought was probably illegal without a permit. 

So when she’d showed up at his door three nights earlier looked frazzled and explained that she was being called away to a conference at the last second and hadn’t had time to find someone to feed her cat and water her plants and would he mind terribly, she hoped she wasn’t imposing but the person who usually did it was sick and she couldn’t think who else to ask and her flight was leaving in two hours and- 

Of course he’d said yes. And for the first few days, all had been well. She was supposed to be getting back into town tonight, and Doug had been toying with the idea of getting her some "welcome home" flowers and seeing if she might be free for dinner later in the week. 

_Potentially cute!_ one part of his brain told him. _Potentially creepy and smacking of “I fed your cat, now sex me up!”_ replied another. He kind of wished they’d both just shut up already so he could think. 

And now, on the day in question, his sister’s usual childcare had fallen through, leaving him playing the doting uncle to a sticky three-year-old ball of energy, something he never _minded_ doing but that added a complicating layer to the whole thing. 

Once inside Hera’s apartment, Doug sat his nephew down on the sofa with his coloring book and crayons. “Stay right here, Samster. I’ve gotta go water some plants. If you sit here and color and wait for me, then you can help feed the cat, okay? And then we’ll go pick Izzy up from school and we’ll all get some ice cream. Just... _please_ don’t touch anything?” 

Sammy ignored his uncle, already flipping through the scribbled-on pages of his book. Doug hoped that was tacit agreement and hurried into the kitchen to see to the plants. Grabbing the watering can from the window ledge, he hastily filled it and headed for the plants on the the other side of the kitchen - 

\- and promptly tripped over something and went down hard on his butt, dumping the contents of the watering can all over his pants in the process. 

He remembered at the last second that Sammy was in earshot and so the dozen or so choice expletives on the tip of his tongue stayed there as he sat dripping on the linoleum, trying to figure out what had happened. Spotting a dripping wet and furious cat perched on the plant shelf, the pieces fit together pretty quickly. Doug groaned, got carefully to his feet, intending to find a rag or something to clean up his mess. 

“Unca Doug?” yelled Sammy from the other room. “I gotta go potty!” 

“Just a second kiddo!” he shouted back. Evidently, the raised voices were enough to send the poor sodden cat over the edge because she made a break for it, leaping off the plant shelf and sending two unlucky plants toppling to the floor. Doug lunged to grab them, slipped in the forgotten puddle of water, and landed on the floor for the second time in as many minutes, this time accompanied by a shower of dirt and leaves and broken pottery. 

This time, the curses made it out, albeit with quiet rage rather than the more cathartic shouting he would have preferred. 

Rubbing his face (and grimacing when he saw the dirt streaking them, oh well, nothing to do for it now), Doug contemplated just how screwed he was. Forget asking Hera to dinner - now he was going to be lucky if she didn’t call the police. 

Kicking into frantic mode, he started trying to gather up the spilled plants to see if they could be salvaged, and succeeded only in cutting his hand on a pottery shard. Feeling almost resigned to his life at this point, he kicked off his newly wet, muddy sneakers - no sense adding muddy footprints to the veritable crime scene the formerly neat apartment had become, after all - and trudged to the bathroom to try and find a band-aid or something for his sluggishly bleeding palm. 

Approaching the bathroom, he saw, in a moment of heart-jolting terror, that the light was on. Approaching carefully, he swung the door open to find Sammy, naked from the waist down, carefully decorating the bathroom with toilet paper streamers. 

“Samuel Douglas Callahan, _what the heck why_.” Doug had never mastered the authoritative parent-voice and he’d never regretted it more than that moment. Generally, he talked to kids like smaller, less pop-culturally-aware people and was fine with that, but as he surveyed the bathroom, he thought he’d have given anything to sound like an intimidating, authority-type figure. 

Sammy just grinned up at him. “I went potty!” 

Doug sighed. “Did you now? Well that’s something, anyway. Samster, where are your - “ 

The front door of the apartment opened and Doug’s heart stopped for the second time that day. Frantically, he considered hiding in the shower. Maybe Hera wouldn’t notice him there! He could hide there until nightfall, and slip out under cover of darkness and she’d just think she’d been burgled by really messy, incompetent thieves and - 

“Hi!” shouted Sammy, ruining everything. Still pantsless, he dashed out of the bathroom. 

“Oh god, why why why - “ Doug muttered as he ran. “Why?” 

He stopped dead when he hit the living room. Hera was standing just inside the door, looking around the apartment with a slightly stunned expression and, in that moment, Doug saw the scene through her eyes - a coloring book and scattered crayons on the coffee table, a sopping wet and puffed-up cat glaring at them all from atop a cat tree, two plants lying in a pile of their own dirt and broken containers, a half-naked child trailing a streamer of toilet paper, and a barefoot, dirt-streaked, bleeding man wearing a crazed expression and wet pants. 

“Hera! You’re - you’re home. Early. Uh.” Doug looked around the room, down at Sammy who just grinned back at him, and raked a dirty hand through his hair. “Hi. How was your trip?” 

Hera continued to stare, her eyes huge behind her glasses. “Uh, it- it was fine, Doug. How...” she swallowed. “How have things been around here?” 

“Yeah about that - “ 

“I went potty!” Sammy piped up and Doug closed his eyes in exasperation, allowed himself a moment of respite, and then launched into damage control mode. 

“Hera, this is my nephew Sammy. I ended up having to watch him today at the last second, and he was supposed to stay in one place, but then the cat tripped me while I was watering the plants so I ended up watering me and her instead, and then she knocked them over, and Sam tried to use the bathroom by himself and _literally everything in the world is conspiring to kill me today._ So I’m very sorry, I’ll clean up this mess, we’ll be on our way, and then I’ll go die of shame somewhere and you’ll never have to deal with me again. Sound good?” 

Hera managed to get through his entire rant with a straight face but it was a near thing. By the end, he just looked so pathetic and embarrassed that she was torn between wanting to reassure him that she wasn’t mad and a strong desire to fall over laughing at his hangdog expression. 

The latter impulse won out and she cracked up. She actually laughed so hard she had to sit down, right on the floor. Doug stared at her for a second, and the realization that she wasn’t going to kill him dawned, quickly followed by the realization that she was actually even cuter than he had previously realized. He started laughing ruefully right along with her, rubbing the back of his neck. 

“So, yeah, that’s been my day.” 

Hera got her giggles under control and moved to stand, wiping her eyes. Doug instinctively reached out a hand to help her up, realized that the proffered hand was the bleeding one, switched at the last second, only to realize after she grabbed it that that one was still dirty. But it didn’t matter after that because she was _holding his hand_ and he felt the big dopey grin spread across his face and a matching warm happiness spread throughout his body. 

She grinned right back at him, and kept his hand in hers. “Tell you what,” she said. “We’ll take care of your hand, then you clean up the kitchen mess, Sammy and I will find him some pants and take care of the bathroom mess, and we’ll meet back here in ten minutes and call it even. Deal?” 

And indeed, twenty minutes later saw a bandaged and dirt-free Doug wiping up the last of the plant detritus from the floor as Hera and Sammy colored in the front room. They grinned up at him when he entered, and Sam proudly showed his uncle the rocket ship they’d been coloring. 

“Nice artwork guys. But do spaceships really come in red and blue polka-dot?” he asked. 

Hera winked. “I can confirm that they do, in fact.” 

Doug wanted to stay, wanted to spend some more time with this amazing girl who hadn’t chased him out of her home despite strong evidence that she should. But a quick glance at his watch told him they were going to have to scamper to make it to Izzy’s school on time. 

“Hera, I’d love to stick around and discuss the finer points of spaceship decorating schemes with you, but we’ve gotta pick up this little monster’s sister over at the elementary school in like, twelve minutes.” He paused, thinking for a moment and then tentatively asked, “But we were planning to get some ice cream afterwards. Would you...would you like to join us?” His voice rose embarrassingly high on the last few words and he cleared his throat, blushing. 

But wonder of wonders, Hera smiled and stood up, tucking the last few crayons back into the box. “Sure, I’d like that! If Sammy doesn’t mind, of course.” She looked down at the little boy. He looked back up at her for a second and then hugged her leg. 

“I think that’s a yes,” Doug said with a chuckle. He prised the toddler off of her. “Come on buddy, let’s go get Miss Isabel.” He straightened up and realized just how close he was Hera. He felt like he should step away but remained frozen in place for a moment, just smiling down at her. 

She didn’t seem to mind, reaching up to brush away some missed dirt near his hairline. “Just one condition, Doug.” 

“Yeah?” 

“In the future, please stay away from my plants.” She grinned cheekily at him and turned to get her purse and shoes. 

Doug stared after her, smitten, realizing just how screwed he was but not caring. 

“Cross my heart, darlin’.”

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from [readerofmuch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Readerofmuch/pseuds/Readerofmuch): "Doug/Hera AU Hey, funny story actually. I'm stuck watching my three year old nephew and he's actually pretty good at picking locks. He didn't really trash your apartment THAT much... Will an ice cream make up the damages?"
> 
> I think I kept to the spirit of the prompt if not the exact letter - Doug kept doing more damage than Sammy so I just went with it - and had a total blast writing this. The jam line early on is shamelessly borrowed from Luke's jam hands rant in _Gilmore Girls_. And yes, Doug's niece and nephew are named Isabel and Samuel. ^.^


End file.
